Today I Learned:
1) Even rock that looks like quartz is sometimes quite brittle -- in the case of the one I tested, much more brittle than a fist-diameter branch of wood.
2) Crystals can be grown larger in space than on Earth. It turns out that gravity-driven sedimentation is an important limiting factor on crystal growth planetside, which obviously isn't a problem in space.
Why would we want to make bigger crysals? Well, aside from giant crystals being cool (have you *seen* the stuff in the Smithsonian's crystal collection?), one of the big problems in biology/biochemistry is the problem of crystallizing proteins, which is required for X-ray crystallography, which is the only way to definitively see the shape of a protein. Apparently some proteins that couldn't be crystallographed on Earth have been crystallized on the ISS, allowing their analysis.
3) The most-sold plasmid on Addgene (the primary source of plasmids in academia) was lentiCRISPRv2, a plasmid for building lentiviral vectors for cas9 (and a guideRNA). Congratulations to Feng Zhang's laboratory! (For scale, lentiCRISPRv2 was ordered around 1,000 times this year, according to addgene. All things considered, academia isn't a huge market....)
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